Uninstall or Change Apps on Your Surface

Before you can uninstall or change an app, you need to select its tile on the Start screen of your Surface. Oddly enough, selecting an app’s Start screen tile is a task rarely stumbled upon on your own. So, here’s the secret:

To select an app on the Start screen, hold your finger down on its icon until the App bar appears along the bottom.

After you select an app, a check mark appears in the app’s top-right corner, like the Bing Travel app.

The App bar also appears along the bottom, listing everything you can do with your newly selected app.

To uninstall an app, tap the Uninstall button from the App bar.

You can also uninstall apps that came pre-installed on your Surface. If you’re not using one of your Surface’s bundled apps, feel free to uninstall it. (It can always be reinstalled from the Windows Store.)

App bar icons also let you change the size of an app’s tile, start or stop the app’s live updates, or unpin (remove) the app from the Start screen.

Selecting the Start screen tile of a traditional Windows desktop program brings a slightly different set of icons to the App bar. You can open the program in a new desktop window, pin it to the desktop’s taskbar, or view its location in the desktop’s File Explorer program.

The Windows 8.1 Spring Update, released through Windows Update in April, lets you pin Start screen apps to the desktop’s taskbar, making them easy to access without a trip to the Start screen.

You can select more than one app at a time, which is handy when weeding out a batch of unwanted tiles from the Start screen.